Friday, April 27, 2007

As I mentioned before more than half of the traffic to my blog comes from search engines. Of course, that doesn't count folks who read content in their RSS reader, but still its a significant number. What's sometimes fun to do is take a look at various search terms that people use to find my blog. This morning I had a really good chuckle because I saw that the search:

top 10 reasons not to do your homework

Put me in position number 2 on Google (at least on the servers in the US that I used). I'm sure glad my kids don't read my blog and to find out that somehow I support not doing your homework.

This made me wonder what else people were searching for, having me come up in the results list AND deciding to click on me. It also made me wonder if this tells me something about what people might think of me or my blog. Or if there's some hidden meaning that I somehow get found for these searches. Maybe there's a subliminal message hidden here.

So I looked back over the past two weeks to see what other searches were brining people to my blog. So I decided to make a list of the Top Ten Searches that might reveal something I didn't know about me and my blog:

Makes me realize that we don't have good sources to find podcasts or videos that appeal to a particular group of people, e.g., folks involved in eLearning. I find them randomly through blog posts. But, if I go to YouTube and search for videos, I will occasionally find good ones, but normally it's a needle in a haystack.

Stephen Downes was recently on a panel that I moderated and as in many things, he and I have a very different approach to things - even though we somehow often land in similar end points. He just put a brief post up and said -

I think the biggest mistake is to over plan a panel.

Stephen pointed us to a really great post by Derek Powazek - How to Moderate a Panel that has some really good advice on moderating. His first bit of advice is to get to know the panelists in depth. Couldn't agree more. He also tells you to not have the panel before the panel. Don't have them get together ahead of time. I also agree. Actually, I agree with everything that Derek is doing. His post is well worth bookmarking to remember.

I would add a few things to what Derek said:

1. Decide ahead of time what you want to get to in the panel and where you won't go. I've gone to many very frustrating panel sessions with experts on the panel and all we do is here about things at a surface level. That's completely the moderators fault. These folks are experts. The panelists get a total of about 15 minutes of airtime. As a moderator, you need to make sure you get them into depth.

2. Because of lack of airtime, I like to give panelists a sense of the topics we'll cover and the kinds of prompts I'm likely to use so they can think of concise answers or what they want to talk about. I don't ask them to talk with each other about this or even me (although I mostly know where they'll go based on conversations). It's still an impromptu answer, but I've found that panelists normally get there quicker if you let them know ahead of time.

3. Push the panelists. As Derek says, as the moderator, you have to be the audience's advocate. Panelists sometimes stop short or go astray of really interesting things. You sometimes have to help them get there.

4. Highlight contrasts and similarities. Contrasts (or better yet disagreements) are the most fun. But it's also great when you have Microsoft, Google and IBM on a panel (I've moderated that before) and point out where they are saying the same things in possibly different ways.

5. Involve the audience as much as you can. While there's not much total time in a panel, it's often really good to ask the audience for quick input on particular topics. It's a nice reality check and makes sure that it's not an us/them thing.

My experience moderating Stephen was quite fun - but honestly - I wasn't sure how it was going to be. He and I have a very different interpretation of what Derek is saying about preparation for the panel. Stephen would prefer to show up cold and let things go where they will go. I prefer to talk to each panelist ahead of time and have an agenda of things we'll talk about and some that we won't because we don't have time. Stephen will make sure he then includes all of those topics (actually he doesn't but he did get a good laugh by pointing out when he was mentioning a topic that was on my list of things we weren't going to be able to cover eveb though they were completely appropriate given the title to the session). In all seriousness, I truly believe that a deeper conversation with Stephen ahead of the panel might have allowed me to aim things a little better and pull him in better and know where I could point out how what he was saying was very much in alignment from what you were hearing from Tony O'Driscoll from IBM and where he aligned with me.

But to add the last point to Derek's post:

6. Have fun and make it a panel session you and the panelists would have wanted to attend.

Andrew McAfee raises an interesting dilemma about the use of Web 2.0 tools (ex. Wikis, Social Bookmarking) in the Enterprise:

people who use the new tools heavily -- who post frequently to an internal blog, edit the corporate wiki a lot, or trade heavily in the internal prediction market -- will be perceived as not spending enough time on their 'real' jobs

This is almost the inverse of the concern that Nick Carr brought up soon after the initial E2.0 article came out -- that busy knowledge workers wouldn't have time for the new technologies.

It's something I've somewhat wondered about. Do people have enough time to use these tools? If so, does that mean that they are somehow not the people who are already "too busy" at their jobs? Are the only people who will use the tools exactly those people who the organization views as time wasters, tinkering about, etc. I think most of us can relate to that kind of concern.

Joe summarizes this concern wonderfully -

That is, won’t employees spending time on the Web checking out Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0-related tools and sites be perceived as not spending enough time at their “real” jobs?

If we turn this towards the world of learning and performance, I'm afraid that we may already be suspects in the pursuit of things that are not our "real jobs."

I wonder how hard it is for people to justify spending time on these new technologies, new ways of learning and collaborating?

This is a fascinating subject for me, because it leads us straight into The Paradox of Informal Learning (Form of Informal?) - which is basically that once you put form and structure to informal learning and try to support it in an organization, it becomes more formal. I've got a lot more on this issue in:

While none of this answers David's question - my guess is that there's nothing that's really going to answer it in a satisfactory way. On the other hand, I believe there are lots of suggestions out there that investment in informal learning makes sense.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Ray Sims has a great post on Personal Learning Environment and personal learning environments. His diagram and description that states that we not only each have our own personal learning environment, but that we are interconnected in all sorts of ways and need to be able to group things together for certain kinds of groups (organizational, informal, etc.) very much aligns with my mental model.

Ray tells us...

What I am reaching for is an optimized environment for Learning AND a loosely-couple optimized environment for Doing.

I agree with his overall goal, but I'm not sure I separate Learning and Doing. In fact, the ideal in most cases is that learning is set up as doing. When I was a professor, I normally tried to start my lectures by setting up the problem. It gives context for what they were going to learn. And since I was teaching techies who are natural problem solvers, it engaged them in something they love. In other words, I don't agree on two environments - Doing and Learning should be the same. Am I doing or learning right now?

Ray goes on to say...

I see the opportunity for Learning Communities to facilitate some common toolsets where the community members have an easy-to-get-started-with PLE that easily integrates with others in the same learning community, while also are connected to others outside the community.

This is a great point. We definitely need easier, starter versions of personal learning support - but starter versions that head you in the right direction longer term.

It was Tony Karrer’s session [at eLearningGuild], An Introduction to New e-Learning Technologies that inspired me to start this blog.

That's always good to see and makes you hopeful that there actually is some good coming from presenting. But it was also great to see the other comments made by this blogger about what they feel they learned from the conference, a few things they are planning to do, etc. It made me realize:

This is a great thing that everyone should do coming out of a conference. Make a list of things you learned. Your aha moments. And a list of the things you plan to do.

Capture this in a public forum so that other conference participants (that includes speakers) can see these and draw from them.

I'm sure this blogger is getting value just from doing #1 (as would everyone else). My guess is that taken together #2 would constitute an incredible post conference exchange of ideas.

His main point is that Rapid eLearning Tools should be aiming at the SMEs, but according to Clive, at the panel session, the vendors claimed they weren't really aimed there. My guess is that they may have been playing to the audience. I agree with Clive that this is part of the intent of rapid eLearning - pushing the tools to SMEs to allow them to easily create small information nuggets. These are not intended to be big courses with lots of interactivity.

One of the comments that Clive got back on his blog was that people were producing poor quality stuff with these tools. I guess it depends on what you mean by poor quality. Is what I'm writing now poor quality? Probably it depends on the context. If you are here trying to learning about Rapid eLearning Tools, then this is definitely poor quality. But, the intent of small bursts of information produced by SMEs is a bit different than producing a 60 minute course on ethics in the workplace (like that really works).

Jay Cross also discusses this session in -Rapid eLearning Panel and he does a good job discussing this very issue:

When is it appropriate to use rapid eLearning development tools? For procedural, how-topics. For things you have to get out the door right away. And I see e-information applications in addition to eLearning. “Information is not instruction,” but sometimes information is all you need.

At the eLearningGuild event, I attended a panel of CLOs from fairly large organizations (including EMC). Most of what they said was pretty much what you'd expect, however, what really surprised me were two things.

First, none of the panelists seemed to focused on finding ways to support informal learning in the organization. EMC owns Documentum (a big document management/content management system) and owns eRoom (a team collaboration tool). Marc Rosenberg, the moderator, asked if he was using these tools as part of his solutions. The answer was roughly - no that's someone else in the organization. Marc pressed him a bit and it seemed that the CLO defined himself in terms of training solutions so these tools really weren't important for him to use to help learners/performers. It was fascinating to see the disconnect.

And it wasn't only the CLO from EMC. Clearly, each of the CLOs saw themselves primarily as providers of formal learning solutions.

Second, when I finally asked a question towards the end of the panel to press each of them on how the mix of their blended learning solutions would be changing (and suggested that they might have to be shorter and available as reference) - they seemed to agree, BUT, within the context of a training, course, courseware kind of model. It was remarkable and extremely old school. I'm still not 100% sure if it was a language thing or what - but this is not what I would have expected.

Isn't it our responsibility to figure out the broader mix of solutions? Are we so caught up in Course and Coursware that we can't see other things?

Wikipedia's English version has more than 1.6 million articles and received 43 million unique visitors from the US in January 2007.

Pages related to entertainment and sexuality represent more than 50 percent of the most visited Wikipedia pages. In particular, many of the most popular pages are related to media celebrities and TV shows, which also constitute some of the most popular queries that were submitted to the search engines in 2006.

70 percent of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from search engines. This implies that links to Wikipedia pages are included in the search results or result page and people select these links.

This makes a lot of sense. People type in search terms into their search engine and Wikipedia articles come up high in the search results because of high page rank or quality of content. While I'm sure there are lots of people (e.g., students) who go to Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia, the majority of the traffic is not that kind of traffic.

This also suggests something about using Wikis for content that we create. While our workers/learners/users will likely use the content sometimes in the reference look-up, it is likely that they will find the content because of it being appropriately indexed both locally (by the Wiki) and within the intranet/extranet/web search engines.

Of course, many organizations have issues with good intranet search. This gives us another reason to suggest that we push that to super high priority.

Monday, April 16, 2007

There's been quite a bit of discussion going on around Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and personal learning environments. We talked about this briefly during a session with Tony O'Driscoll, Brent Schelenker, and Steven Downes at the eLearningGuild. And then over beers.

I can talk about webs and networks and personal learnings and PLEs but there's a disconnect unless people see themselves as learners rather than teachers.

Stephen seems a bit worried in his post that people in the corporate world don't get the concept. They are used to command and control. There's some truth to that, but at the end of my What's New in eLearning session (on blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, rss readers, etc.) my final point was that we each needed to become better learners. That's exactly what Stephen, Tony O, and Brent said during our panel. When Stephen and I are agreeing on something ...

Note: Stephen and I don't agree on using the term Personal Learning Environment (PLE) with capitals to mean a put together system that integrates and supports your personal learning and a personal learning environment (lower case letters, no acronym) as the set of tools you use to help yourself learn (likely not very integrated). I believe that we all have a personal learning environment ... we just are not necessarily conscious of it.

My personalised learning environment includes many aspects of my knowledge network, including my browser favourites, my RSS feeds, my electronic documents and so on. But it's also non-digital and not easily captured in my browser. It includes my wife, friends and work colleagues, my tennis coach, my books, magazines and newspapers, the TV I watch, the films I see, the radio programmes that I listen to.

Does a fantastic job defining her personal learning environment. I love her approach on this and had suggested this as a Meme a little while ago and I hope others will post similar discussions of what their personal learning environment looks like.

I'm just returning from my trip to Boston (and NYC and Cape Cod - with my wife and kids). In Boston, I was at the eLearningGuild event and had the wonderful opportunity to speak at Harvard Business School (more on these sometime soon).

One of the more fun things we did in Boston was going out for a beer tasting that was organized by Jim Javenkoski, Learn.com and myself. You can read Jim's write-up Of beer, blogists and Boston.

I think there will always be value in taking time out to figure out where the gaps exist between what people need to know and need to be able to do, and where they actually are. And there will always be a place for well-designed, formal content, prepared by people who have taken the time to find out what works for adult learners, in the quest to fill those gaps.

Even Valerie in her defense seems to acknowledge that the trend is towards alternatives to courses and courseware. So, what do you do to take advantage of a move to alternatives? Tom responds with Preparing for changing opportunities.

What I'm quickly realizing is how important this conversation really is and it's far beyond ILT and OTS Vendors - it's all of us. It's a question of what will be happening. Take a look at George Siemens post - Is Print Dying? from a day or so ago and not in any way part of the Big Question. Among other things he says:

The challenges of media are providing valuable lessons for education. Any industry that has formerly viewed content as the key value point - media, newspapers, education, museums, libraries - are in the middle of a substantial shift. ...content changes too rapidly to be our value point.

I received a question about a particular eLearning Design challenge that someone was facing and I realized that the title of my blog and the way I post doesn't really do justice to talking about design and patterns in designing eLearning in this blog. I'll try to work on that, but here's a list of posts that are relevant to eLearning design and eLearning patterns:

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

We are being asked to use Adobe Captivate on a project. I understand that Captivate is great for simulations and demonstrations of computer tasks, and can be used for scenario-based training for that kind of content. All good.

However, this project doesn't involve ANY simulations, demonstrations, or scenario-based training. It's an employee orientation that consists of many (500) slides of text and graphics. We'll make the slides fun with graphic effects and movies, but that doesn't change the slide model.

So, I thought that Articulate Presenter might be a better choice for this project. What do you think?

Certainly, as the person asking the questions states, if you were going for Software Simulation eLearning then Captivate (or the other tools list in my post) would be more appropriate than Captivate. But, in this case, it's not simulation, it's interactive presentation.

For the task described, where the source is initially MS PowerPoint slides, Articulate Presenter is going to be easier to use. Especially if you have animations or anything beyond the slides in your source PowerPoint. There's actually another product that Adobe offers - Adobe Presenter based on Breeze that is a plug-in or add-on to PowerPoint that allows you to continue to author in PowerPoint but it doesn't offer the same level of interaction support as Articulate Presenter.

From the question - "make it fun through graphic effects and movies" doesn't necessarily imply interaction - quizzes, games, etc. But I sincerely hope that somewhere among your 500 slides, you plan to make things interactive. However, if you really are not, then either Articulate Presenter or Adobe Presenter should be fine. I just feel sorry for the person going through the content.

One last point to make on this - these tools are not mutually exclusive. Captivate can be used to create Flash movies that can be embedded inside of Presenter. So, if there's a brief interaction that you feel can be created best in Captivate, you can always do that as well. So depending on how stubborn the person is who is pushing for Captivate, you might suggest that you primarily use Presenter and use Captivate for certain aspects.

Clive just posted - Apples and Pears - about the eLearningGuild's new report on Learning Management Systems. I was one of the authors of the report and it was interesting to have an opportunity to interview people and see the numbers produced through a pretty extensive interview process.

Clive points out one of the more interesting discoveries in the survey results numbers - Moodle comes back as being used inside lots of corporations. In fact, it appears near the top in market share even among larger corporations.

However, as Clive points out, this is somewhat misleading (and the report covers the difference between an CMS, LMS and TMS). We had a fair amount of debate among the researchers about how to handle the fact that Moodle comes out being used inside a lot of corporations, but often used in a very limited fashion. We tried to handle it by drawing distinctions where possible, but the fact remains that lots of companies are using Moodle.

On the other hand, you should know that when a corporation uses Moodle they often are using it for some very simple course delivery, creating assessments, etc. In fact, if you only have a couple of courses or you need to put up an environment for a couple of eLearning courses, then Moodle may be a great option.

At the same time, every large company that I interviewed who had indicated they used Moodle, were only using Moodle as a short-term solution on the way to something more or as a targeted solution.

Bottom line - consider Moodle for these kinds of situations. But to paraphrase Clint Eastwood - A man's got to know Moodles limitations.

I'll be curious to see what kinds of responses come out around this topic. There's really a lot at stake in this question in that it goes far beyond the question. The reality is that all providers of content are competing in a flat world, with easy access to virtually every other information source and many different, alternative means of content creation. In this world, content producers face real challenges. And this isn't just in corporate training and education. My post - Disruptive Changes in Learning - points to examples such as TV, Music, Press, etc. If you are a producer of content, you are now competing with many new sources.

As a content vendor providing training (Instructor Led or eLearning), you are naturally having to compete with each person's ability to find information via a Google search or through access to a service like Safari (which makes all of the O'Reilly books fully searchable).

While I often hear lots of answers to these from vendors, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to have a compelling differentiation. So, there's real problems, especially if you stay with traditional models of Courses and Courseware - see Course and Courseware are Fading - The Future of eLearning. You can't afford to be in that business going forward.

(One exception to this rule - for things like most compliance training where companies are wanting to "check the box" - they will continue to use courses and will want short versions and box checking. Lowest cost will dominate. But courses and courseware will remain.)

The good news is that there's also some hope for innovative companies who can move beyond the business of Courses and Courseware. Generally customers are buying something more than a course or courseware. In IT world, they are transitioning their staff from Java to .Net or from .Net 1.0 to .Net 2.0. In sales they are moving to consultative selling. It might be a culture change initiative. Or employee engagement. Or customer satisfaction. Etc. There's always more to the picture than providing courses and courseware.

My belief is that there's great opportunity to make smart use of new kinds of eLearning Solutions that will have real impact on the actual results that people care about. Take customer satisfaction. In a recent solution for a large retailer, we provided tools that:

Showed customer satisfaction numbers (that already existed) at the store level so that store managers could identify areas where they needed work.

Provided a variety of possible interventions the store manager could use (some with content, some that were more like a series of meetings-in-a-box).

Had store managers create an action plan composed of the steps of these interventions and had that approved with their district manager.

Helped them remember needed steps and track progress.

Prompted the district manager's involvement appropriately to reinforce actions.

Tracked the results so we could figure out what interventions worked and which didn't.

This intervention is worth many millions of dollars to the client. Far more than it cost to implement. It attacks the issue of helping store managers to improve customer satisfaction. While there's quite a bit of content created, it's not really about the content.

There's also this old CEO adage:

There's margin in mystery.

In other words, because we aren't coming in and saying "here's some content we are selling you" - instead, it's a whole system, and tracking, and hitting people with communication over time - it's not as obvious what's going on. Under the hood, it's not terribly complicated, but it's still got some mystery. Probably the best example of this that I've ever worked on was eHarmony. If you've ever taken a personality profile, you know how they come back and seem to know you. eHarmony does that as well. It allows them to command a premium. Same thing is true of a more recent client MyShape. When there's mystery, you can command a premium. More on this in Matching Algorithm.

If you look at things like Gallup's Q12 Employee Engagement system, it's not terribly complicated, but it sells well because of the mystery.

Now the good news is that it's easier than ever to create solutions that are more interesting than simple courses and courseware. You can hit people many times over the course of time. You can hit them in new ways. On new devices. In virtual training environments (sandboxes). As an example, if I've got a conversion of an IT staff to .Net 2.0, I probably don't want to ship them all to classes at one time. Rather, I'd like to get them trained up a bit and then have them get coached over the course of time. Plus, when it's new technology, having to get it set-up is always a pain as well - maybe you can provide sandboxing support. Further, I probably have some superstars that I give more training to at the start and then provide them with tools and systems to get the rest of the staff up-to-speed. Do you think they can do that on their own? Probably not well. But with some support they might be able to. Maybe the management needs some training as well, but that won't be classroom. Maybe they need some on-going coaching over the beginning of the project. In fact, if you are providing risk reduction over the first few projects, then maybe the solution isn't really training on .Net 2.0 but rather a transition to .Net 2.0 development capability. There's likely a suite of offerings and a series of things that need to happen to get them transitioned. If it was only getting some folks up to speed on .Net 2.0, well they could read a book or go use Google. There's a lot of other barriers.

I know that I'm probably not helping define a specific enough game plan for any vendor and maybe this isn't practical for some people. But my suspicion is that most vendors need to move in this direction in order to sustain margins.

I'm hopeful that we are going to see some interesting discussions on this topic.

And resources found via eLearning Learning's pages on Learning Management Systems and LMS. Click these links to find a constantly update Best Of posts on these topics. But here are some great resources:

About Me

Dr. Tony Karrer works as a part-time CTO for startups and midsize software companies - helping them get product out the door and turn around technology issues. He is considered one of the top technologists in eLearning and is known for working with numerous startups including being the original CTO for eHarmony for its first four years. Dr. Karrer taught Computer Science for eleven years. He has also worked on projects for many Fortune 500 companies including Credit
Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, Citibank, Lexus, Microsoft, Nissan,
Universal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Fidelity
Investments, Symbol Technologies and SHL Systemhouse. Dr. Karrer was
valedictorian at Loyola Marymount University, attended the University
of Southern California as a Tau Beta Pi fellow, one of the top 30
engineers in the nation, and received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer
Science. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events.